For some of us, spring has been slow to arrive, but it’s just a matter of time before everything is back in bloom and the bees are doing their pollinating.

Vancouver’s Scot Ritchie, in his First Book series of non-fiction picture books for the very young, has turned his attention to honeybees. In Follow That Bee!, the five friends featured in the series — Sally, Nick, Pedro, Martin and Yulee — visit Mr. Cardinal, Martin’s neighbour, who keeps beehives in his backyard and has invited the gang over to see how honeybees live. Ritchie tells the story visually in his distinctive scratchy, cartoonish style, combining it with a paragraph of text about Mr. Cardinal, the kids, and the bees. Each two-page spread also offers, in a boldface sentence or two, straightforward information about honeybees.

In the spread titled Bee a Friend, for example, we’re told bees are suffering “because they can’t find the range of wildflowers they need,” that pesticides and fungicides can hurt them (a glossary at the back explains unfamiliar) and “when bees aren’t strong and healthy, they may die from parasites and infections that normally wouldn’t cause them harm.”

But the book is no downer. Any child with a sweet tooth will enjoy learning about how bees make honey and any child afraid of being stung will take comfort from the calm, matter-of-fact way Mr. Cardinal helps Nick deal with a bee sting. In the portion titled Let it Bee, kids are told “people are turning their gardens and rooftops into homes for bees” and in the last two-page spread, they’re told how they themselves can help the bees.

It will come as no surprise that Lemony Snicket approaches the subject of bees in a quirkier fashion. In Swarm of Bees, illustrated by Rilla Alexander, it’s the behaviour of a little boy that warrants greater scrutiny than the behaviour of bees. Bold, graphic images created with rubber stamps, ink and digital collage, show a mischievous lad dragging a red wagon filled with tomatoes. Red fruit in hand, he spies a beehive hanging from a branch and lets fly. On the title page, we see the result: a flurry of black, yellow and grey dots representing the bees emerges from the hive. Snicket tells us the bees are angry, inviting guesses as to what they might do.

Taking readers on a surprisingly energetic tour that begins with a sailor on a ship who finally makes land and rushes to greet his mother, Snicket asks if the bees are going to sting the sailor, the mother or the people gathered at a nearby food truck.

The boy, meanwhile, continues flinging his tomatoes, eventually getting chased by the sailor and a crowd of townspeople. By the time the boy’s father, a chef, enters the picture, the local beekeeper has managed to catch and calm the bees, and while Snicket admits it can feel good to be angry, “it can feel better to stop.”

The boy hugs his dad, who prepares a spaghetti feast (with tomato sauce) for the entire crowd and the boy — his red wagon now filled with cleaning supplies — heads out to mop up the mess he has made.